I’ve had this puzzleless, sci-fi/horror, workplace slice of life thing I started implementing in Twine some years back, starting around 2016ish whose title never really solidified for me. Best I got was “A Case of the MONs.” I never got past the opening bits of it other than some other scattered parts: weather reports with normalized acid rain, news articles, a couple dialog trees with co-workers, some ideas for weird work tasks. It was basically just like… eh, kinda what it was like to work in I.T., but as a near-future dystopia (because we haven’t seemed to be heading in any other direction) peppered with like thoughts/examples on “What is Wrong with America,” addiction, corporate water ownership, surrealism, and murder. Unfortunately the opening was still somehow very “my apartment”-ish, and I think that hurt my motivation to push past the opening except for jotting down snippets. Plus as much as I tried it all kinda took itself too seriously and I couldn’t deal with that.
It was a lipogram of Y, not like as a “whoa, sick stunt bro,” but more to try to keep it interesting enough that I might see writing it as fun or at least a neat challenge instead of just soul-crushing. I had a whole “made for TV movie” short story written for it that was something I wrote shortly after the 2016 election that went nowhere (I mean never got published anywhere and never really got workshopped either) and really dis-spirited me for a while. It was also to feature one ending where the player is killed in an active shooter event because there are so many games around that subject, but almost never from that perspective. Also because “Run, Hide, Fight,” is the most ridiculous safety policy a country has ever come up with (if you’re not American, yes that is a 100% real, American safety training video). I thought about buckling down on this Twine thing again after witnessing an active shooter event in my apartment parking lot last April, but still never made progress on it.
Other features: You could talk to the angriest version of Garfield, a sort of hallucinated static tiger vowing revenge against the start of the workweek and the Nazis that ultimately co-opted him as a symbol. William McFarland was president, pushing legislation to ban remote work. Dated references to Cats (2019), including the new hit movie “Cats II: Return of the Jellicle Dead” (is it too late to toss that one into SeedComp?). Nestlé and Coca-Cola owned the Great Lakes, thanks to an article that I actually barely even had to rewrite.
Instead of continuing to write it, I became deeply depressed and did a lot of cocaine and molly for… a while. It seemed like a rational response at the time. I’ve since moved on to other things to write [and off those illicit medications! Please don’t do drugs. ] for now, but ideas for this one still churn in my head from time-to-time, and I still do appreciate the challenge of attempting to eliminate the letter Y from a passage now and then.